You Offend Me

Thanksgiving. It's a time to give thanks, visit with family and friends and eat tremendous quantities of food.

Thanksgiving also ushers in the Christmas season, starting with Santa making his first appearance and Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year. As Thanksgiving week-end comes to an end, today is the biggest travel day of year.

One means of travel, flying, has become the dregs of transportation. As I said in Fear of Flying, I used to love flying, but it has become the worst way to travel, in my opinion. There are all sorts of reasons -- such as late flights, long delays, lost luggage, cramped quarters and no food (as opposed to the old crummy food), which have all combined to make a travel by plane an unwelcome part of any trip.

However, security measures are the true bane of air travel. As I noted in George & Stephan Sitting on a Plane, the airlines have permitted bigotry and intolerance to determine whether someone is flyworthy. Not only do you have to pass through onerous checkpoints and stay off the "no fly" list (without knowing the criteria for exclusion or inclusion), but now you have to pass the Mob Rule and Flight Attendant tests.

There have been numerous examples of people being removed from planes while Flying While Arab, see e.g., Prayer Free Zone. That includes religious outbursts -- otherwise known as praying on a plane. Gay lovers are another no-no on planes, as the George & Stephan post shows. In that post, I also inquired:

What does this have to do with terrorism? Who is the arbiter of appropriate airplane behavior? The pilot? The flight attendant? Or is it the Mob Rule Rules?

And where will it end?

The answer apparently is that there is no end to the type of behavior that can subject you to banishment from the skies. Liza Featherstone, who writes The Nation's blog, The Notion, tells about a mother and child who were removed from a plane because of a breastfeeding incident, in For Hungry Baby, Unfriendly Skies:

According to news reports, Emily Gillette, a 27-year-old New Mexico woman, says that when she attempted to nurse her baby on a Delta Airlines flight, the uptight stewardess gave her a blanket, asking her to cover up. When Gillette refused, the flight attendant threw mother and baby off the plane! Silly Emily--doesn't she know those things are for selling beer and cars? Any other public use is obviously obscene.

The Burlington Free Press carried a report in Woman alleges she was kicked off Burlington flight for breast-feeding, detailing what occurred:

The flight had been delayed by three hours, and it was about 10 p.m. when it appeared that it was nearing takeoff time.

Gillette said she was seated in the second-to-last row, next to the window, when she began to breast-feed her daughter. . . . She said she was being discreet -- her husband was seated between her and the aisle -- and no part of her breast was showing.

Gillette said that's when a flight attendant approached her, trying to hand her a blanket and directing her to cover up. Gillette said she told the attendant she was exercising her legal right to breast-feed, declining the blanket. That's when Gillette alleges the attendant told her, "You are offending me," and told her to cover up her daughter's head with the blanket.

"I declined," Gillette said in her complaint.

Moments later, a Delta ticket agent approached the Gillettes and said that the flight attendant was having the family removed from the flight.

Gillette said she didn't raise her voice -- not wanting to make a scene in the current jumpy air travel atmosphere -- and complied with the ticket agent, crying as she exited the plane.

What security violation was this? Breastfeeding in public may be legal, but the same rules don't seem to apply in airspace. Rather, airlines will condone much in the name of security. Pilots, attendants and other passengers all get to decide who flies (or doesn't). And of course, as with Gillette, the targeted passenger is usually fearful about objecting, since the penalty may even be worse than merely being deplaned. There may be a "So sorry, our mistake," by the airline after the fact, but there does not appear to be any standards in place to stop this egregious treatment in the first place.

Liza Featherstone sums it up in her post, Flying While Arab:

Praying, and feeding children, would rank pretty high on most people's list of inoffensive and even wholesome activities. There are plenty of larger issues embedded in these two outrageous stories -- about racism and religious intolerance in the war on terror, misogyny and puritanism, disregard for basic individual freedoms -- but I'd like to also point out that flying is an increasingly miserable experience for everyone. A plane is essentially a Greyhound bus in the sky these days. The workers are short-staffed and stressed-out, laboring for stingier pay and benefits; thus, not surprisingly, they seem to have completely lost patience with the passengers. I think we're seeing more and more examples of capricious and just plain rude treatment; you're just particularly vulnerable to it if you're praying in Arabic, taking off your shirt or doing anything the slightest bit unusual. Making matters worse, most companies, desperate to milk some profits out of us, overbook flights and cram seats closer and closer together. You have to bring your own food, and are too-rarely offered coffee, or even water. Only the fatcats in first class look comfortable. All the security regulations -- which, by the way, seem stupidly based on a few high-profile incidents (because of the Shoe Bomber, we all have to take off our shoes, and because of the London liquid bomb scare, no sunblock for the kids) -- add to the sour mood.

On that note, enjoy your trip home.

See UPDATE on praying protest at Prayer Free Zone.

Tags: News, Civil Liberties, Flying